Quotes About Authority

Losing your job sets you free from the controlling mandate of your work

My soul, sir? I haven't got one. The management doesn't allow them.

You can lead and motivate people without a certificate or title, what you need to do is to tell people a compelling secret that was only known to you.

Business is boss, politics is servant.

The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters or entrepreneurs. The coop is guarded from the inside.

People misunderstand what a police state is. It isn't a country where the police strut around in jackboots; it's a country where the police can do anything they like. Similarly, a security state is one in which the security establishment can do anything it likes.

If the media is a farce, why should you be the only one stuck with rules and restrictions?

My parents did the whole good-cop/bad-cop thing - Dad was the bad cop, and Mom was the good cop. I remember my father saying, 'I'm his father, not his friend.' That kind of stuck with me.

At Libertyville High, I was a bad student, chronic truant, and all-round incorrigible. I was forever being sent to the principal's office to be disciplined.

The most dangerous thing about student riots is that adults take them seriously.

A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, 'If you don't know how to make the right decision, you're not a director.'

Saddam Hussein admired, studied, and copied Stalin, the paragon of modern dictators.

Presidents need to be critically studied and analyzed.

The deciphering of ancient scripts changed forever the way Europeans were able to imagine the story of humanity, destroying centuries of received authority about the past with repercussions as important for our understanding of time and history as the geological studies of the same period.

I'm a professor of national security studies, and I know a lot more about fighting than Rumsfeld does.

But at the same time, never having final cut before, I really learned an interesting thing for any studio executive who is reading this: that if a director has final cut, it's actually easier and more interesting to listen to notes.

For years it never occurred to me to question the judgment of those in charge at the studio.

Agents have enormous power that studios relinquished to them. The studios, when I first came to Hollywood, that's where the power was.

We don't over-manage projects like the studios do.

Looking back, I was a very good kid, very studious and all. But I would always come out with a quip - and I was sent to the principal's office several times.

My mother would never let me in the kitchen. I always wanted to cook, but I was never allowed to. Her view of the world was, 'Cooking is my job, and studying is your job.' I think, in retrospect, she didn't like the chaos. She was very orderly. It had to be her way.

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

Even when powerful men stumble, they inspire fear.

When I'm a stunt woman on a movie, I'm strictly a 'Yes sir,' girl... But acting puts more in your hands, and producing gives you more control still.